Cassie McCullagh

We're a very diverse family and I am proud of it.

Not recognising that everybody else around the table is horrified that he would bring this up.

Just how many undercurrents are there in this family?

And a particularly Javanese thing as well as a Chinese thing.

And controlling money and business.

Mm-hmm.

And the other thing that I think becomes interesting in this novel is how that's played out in terms of gender, which women are not only allowed to work but are expected to work and to be on boards and to be CEOs and those who are expected just to shop.

Nice, trend spotting.

I love it.

And as you say, it's not really giving anything away because we know from that first paragraph that Estella has murdered everybody at this huge family feast.

Well, there's only one survivor, but she's poisoned them all.

So it's a why done it rather than a who done it.

And so we learn more and more about Estella.

It starts off quite light.

There's some quite funny things about, you know, the cousin who's hopeless at housekeeping, which turns out to mean she's not very good at telling the nanny and the maids what to do.

That's what being bad at housekeeping is.

And so for something that starts off with a murder of, I mean, she says 300 people, so it's quite a family feast.

It's quite light at first and then it becomes darker and darker.

So we go with the two sisters as they go to America, which is also an interesting exploration of racism, isn't it?

I've got a question, and maybe Helen might be able to kind of elucidate this.